Arcade Fire Are Kung Fu Fighting in New Mash Up from Go Home Productions

It only takes a few seconds of “Kung-Fu Reflektor” to demonstrate just how much fun Mash ups can be, when they are done well. Arcade Fire and Carl Douglas might not be the most obvious bedfellows, but this is as much fun in three minutes as you will ever find on YouTube, with the possible exception of seeing John Prescott being egged and then punching his assailant.

From the moment Freelance Hellraiser released a song where Cristina Aguilera sang over The Strokes’ guitars and word spread about an hour-long 2 Many DJs set, the Mash-Up moved inexorably mainstream. Sampling was one thing, but to combine an entire song’s vocal with a completely different tune? This was witchcraft.

It isn’t always successful. Although Disney’s “Let It Go” is clearly made to be spliced with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, I have yet to find a well-made, credible version, although there have been several attempts. A successful mash-up, it would appear, is not quite as simple as picking the right tunes…

Vidler shows The Bee Gees that they missed a trick by not combining with Killing Joke earlier in their career….

…and when Billy Joel sings against the backdrop of Amy Winehouse’s backing band on “Love Is A Piano Man”, he’s never sounded more hurt and sincere, and the song is lifted from a humdrum MOR staple to a raggedy torch-ballad of desolation.

Then Queens of the Stone Age combine with Imagination’s “Body Talk” for the funkiest version of No-One Knows you could ever believe and you realise, as Homme unwittingly gives his best Nile Rogers impression, that it takes a real leap of imagination to even dream that two songs so different could ever sound so good together.

There’s more… The Beatles and The Knack combine with “My Paperback Sharona”…

the body talk/queens one is the most bizarre one to me…a great selection there…the oddly tragic thing with mash ups is they can blow you away,but only once…like a joke that can’t really be ran up the flag pole twice.

Hmmm. Maybe, on some (the Springsteen one above is a good example where it is clever but not as good as just listening to Born To Run) but then again there’s a Velvet Underground / Cristina Aguilera mash up that I think I might actually prefer to the original of “Rock n Roll” that it is based upon… I probably shouldn’t admit that of course…

I’m a huge fan of a man called Ben Liebrand. He’s Dutch and makes mixes, including mash-ups of songs. This mash-up is one of my favourites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4nMcsdPPdQ . Check out his work: it’s great!